About Volume

Volume Limited are a leading independent integrated marketing communications specialist helping businesses drive their sales opportunities and revenues by using the latest digital content delivery platforms, social networks and fixed media channels. Based in Wokingham in Berkshire their offices span five locations globally. Established in 1997 with an offering to increase businesses sales and marketing performance they now have a impressive client base including Dell, Oracle and the NHS.

The Challenge

Volume made a decision to open a development office in Sri Lanka to keep costs down during company growth. “I had to find a solution that would allow our developers to work closely with our UK development team and UK infrastructure.” Paul Brazier, Head of Information Services at Volume.

At the beginning of the project Volume investigated a more conventional setup: a small branch office with infrastructure services, powerful workstations and a branch VPN. Paul stated “I liaised with Volume’s Technology Director and requirements for this project were escalating - database access, filestore copies, source control proxy servers, backups etc. To facilitate this project we would have had to implement a large leased line to Sri Lanka which would have a massive impact on the costs”.

At this stage in the project Paul Brazier contacted Vcentral who had already been in discussions with Volume about the technologies that were available for their project. Paul stated, “our key objectives were cost effectiveness, performance and reliability and scalability”.

The Solution

Vcentral met with Paul and it was clear that a virtual desktop solution would meet the requirement of Volume and provide a scalable infrastructure for future growth. Vcentral showed Paul a demo of Citrix XenDesktop and following this a pilot was set up for Volume Directors to understand the technologies and how the solution would work for them.

Once Volumes objectives were fully understood Vcentral recommended Citrix and Wyse as the technologies behind the virtual desktop solution, but it was ultimately Paul who chose the final solution to implement; “We chose Citrix XenDesktop and Wyse thin client technologies as they were both the trusted market leaders”. Vcentral implemented Citrix XenDesktop Platinum on the current UK infrastructure, using the Citrix NetScaler VPX for the connection between the UK and Sri Lanka. Wyse thin clients were shipped out to Sri Lanka along with instructions for set up by the developers which meant they could quickly get working.

The Benefits

“In terms of the benefits to our organisation the solution has provided us with ease of management, reducing our operational costs and given us a guaranteed performance” commented Paul. The scalable solution keeps in line with the plan to grow business at Volume. Creating new desktops for users can be done in minutes and with all data kept in the Volume datacentre the solution is also secure.

Timescales and budgets were incredibly restrained at the point that Paul engaged with Vcentral. The project was delivered to timescales and budget with Paul stating “having a late U-turn in the project did not leave too much time for implementation so there were constraints but all services, software and hardware was in production on time”.

Why Vcentral?

“Vcentral have had a lot of exposure in real world implementations similar to my requirements which gave me confidence in answers to my questions. I was in a position where I had to present this idea to my Directors and I needed to be sold nearly as much as my Directors that this solution will work for our requirement. Understanding our time and budget restraints I felt that Vcentral adapted very well to helping me get the solution approved and meeting our constraints” remarked Paul.